That's one of the reasons why Amsel recently won one of the country's top prizes for teaching. This summer she became McGill's first teacher to win the Canadian Professor of the Year Award offered jointly by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education and Merck Frosst. In 1991, Amsel won the Leo Yaffe Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Faculty of Science.

Pretty impressive stuff for a woman who never dreamed that she would be teaching university students in the first place.

"I didn't see myself as a people person at all," recalls Amsel. "I saw myself as this quiet, shy woman who would spend her working days in a small office looking at a computer screen."

The youthful Amsel has worked at McGill for more than 25 years. While completing a master's degree in computer science, she joined the University as a computer programmer/technician at the Montreal Neurological Institute where she worked on a brain-mapping project. She moved to the Department of Psychology and continued to work as a computer specialist.

Students in the department struck up conversations with Amsel and soon noticed that not only was she blessed with a brain adept at statistics (her master's thesis related to statistical analysis), she also had a natural ability to explain difficult concepts in a clear, palatable manner.

Word spread through the department and Amsel's office quickly became a haven for graduate students with math woes.

"It wasn't my primary job," says Amsel of her former role as unofficial statistics coach, "but I was told that as long as it didn't get in the way of my work, the department was happy for me to do it as much as I wanted."

Taking notice of Amsel's popularity, a professor asked her to help him teach a graduate seminar. "I thought, 'Why not?' The seminar was small and I wouldn't be the only one up there teaching."

The seminar went well and shortly after, the department lost some faculty members who taught statistics. The chair of the department turned to Amsel. Would she be interested in taking on the introductory statistics course?

"I was going to say no. Teaching a small seminar with a professor was one thing. Teaching an introductory course all by myself to 100 students was something else. I didn't think I could handle it."

Marjorie Rose, the department's administrative assistant at the time, convinced Amsel to give it a shot. "Marjorie told me I would never know whether I liked teaching unless I gave it a real chance. I had enormous respect for her, so I took her advice."

On her first day, Amsel remembers being terrified. She thought calamity was only moments away. To her surprise, though, things went well. "They didn't know how scared I was! Then they started to learn and I thought, 'This is kind of cool.'"

Amsel's introductory statistics course often has 400 students in it these days. Her class is compulsory for all undergraduates in psychology  students in both the science and arts streams have to take it. Undergraduates and graduate students from other departments sign up as well.

The students Amsel takes special pride in reaching tend to come from the Faculty of Arts. Students like Ray Satterthwaite.

Today Satterthwaite is the director of the McGill Annual Fund in the Development Office, but not too long ago he was a psychology student who dreaded studying statistics. Having had a bruising encounter with a math course in high school, Satterthwaite wasn't keen about encountering the subject again. "The first day of her class, I just didn't want to walk through that door. I thought, 'Oh no. It's math again.'"

But to Satterthwaite's amazement, he enjoyed the course.

"Her approach wasn't just about numbers in a textbook. She applied statistics to real-life situations." For instance, Satterthwaite says Amsel would sometimes dissect the statistics in a research paper for her class. "She would look at the numbers and explain why they were significant or, in some cases, how the researchers were talking through their hats."

"We're extremely fortunate to have her here," says another admirer, Professor Norman White, chair of the Department of Psychology. "We hear testimonials from her students all the time. They say they never could have gotten through the course without her."

Amsel isn't afraid to try something new with her students. At one point she and her TAs noticed that students weren't paying much attention to the TAs' comments on their assignments  the students just focused on their grades.

"The TAs weren't happy about that  they want to be educators, not graders. So we stopped putting grades on the papers. We just pointed students to where they made mistakes and told them to try to fix it or they wouldn't get a mark." Students who couldn't complete their assignments in two or three tries made appointments with Amsel so they could concentrate on where they were having problems.

That approach worked, but Amsel is quick to confess that not all of her teaching ideas have been as successful. "Students will put up with a lot if they think you're sincere about trying to reach them. If something isn't working, I give up on it pretty quickly. I'm very attuned to what goes on in my class. I think I'm good at picking up clues that tell me if things are going well or not  the way people sit, the expressions on their faces."

Amsel is also known for her interest in teaching students with disabilities. She co-authored two handbooks on the subject and contributed to an instructional film aimed at new professors learning to teach to students with learning and physical disabilities. Her work has drawn praise from the Association for Handicapped Student Services Programs in Postsecondary Education.

"I had a deaf student in one of my classes about 20 years ago, but I didn't know it until the end and she failed the course. That really bothered me because I know I could have done things that would have made a difference to her. I tend to walk around quite a bit during class  I could have made sure that I always faced the students so she could lip-read. I could have written down all the new terms I introduced on the blackboard so she could understand what I was saying. There are things you can do to reach out to these students that can actually improve the experience for everybody."

Teaching isn't the only thing on Amsel's plate these days  she is also McGill's associate dean of students. It's all a far cry from the career she once envisioned as a bashful techie and she still finds herself a little bemused. "It's surprising where life can take you if you let it."